


Something Real

by GlitchGrrl



Category: Antisepticeye - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-18 18:24:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16522319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitchGrrl/pseuds/GlitchGrrl
Summary: dear reader,unfortunately, demonic possession of your computer is considered tampering by unauthorized third-party personnel and as such renders the manufacturer's warranty legally void. we apologize for any inconvenience.sincerely,tech support





	1. not like other (fan)girls

I'̶m A̛L͢WA͜YS ͜tḩe̸re. _Always_ ̡w̷at̛c҉hin̵g͏.

Ąnd ̷fo̡r͏ ͢y̵ou̶.̨.. ̵t̷hi͠s isn͢'̢t͢ over.̷

 _It was obvious what it meant, no matter what_ the fandom _wanted it to mean. Anti was always watching... Jack. Sure, he claimed to be eternal, but in fact he was quite limited, a monster who could only terrorize from within the body of his host, who only threatened from the other side of the camera. Even his constant threats to Jack's own life were dulled by the knowledge that if Jack died, there was no reason to expect he would escape alive. He watched from within, controlled his puppets, mocked the powerlessness of his audience, as he glared small and flickering from twenty million screens into twenty million pairs of eyes he would never even be able to see. Even within the fiction of his existence, sad little king of a sad little hill._

_And what if he were real? And what, even, if he could, somehow, project himself out into the world without Jack? Why would he waste his time – even if he were truly, somehow, eternal – watching you? A mundane life in twenty million mundane lives, no special power or place, no camera on you to capture any strange twitch or smile or flicker. This was a one-way relationship: You watched him. That was all._

_____________________________________  


You hit pause.

You knew better than this. You had heard podcasts about this kind of thing, about people – _obsessed fans_ – who imagined celebrities and important figures were speaking directly to them, through the television or computer screen. You had to assume it was even worse if the person you imagined was talking to you was fictional, not to mention not actually a person at all.

There had to be an actual glitch in your computer. Or in your brain, which you'd heard was also like a computer, in some ways, and thus prone to glitches. Not the fun kind of glitch, in either case. The bad kind.

Antisepticeye had not just said your name.

Your hand hovered for a few seconds over the arrow key, tapped it hesitantly, backed up the video. You were about to hit the spacebar, to play it again, to hear what he really said, what your brain had somehow twisted into your own name, but instead you just... stopped. Something in the pit of your stomach felt cold and sour and wrong.

You had clearly been spending too much time watching these videos, if it was making you imagine things like that. That was the problem. The chill of dread, as though some deep-down part of you feared if you listened again you might confirm that you were not imagining things... that was just a symptom of the problem, which was too much time watching Youtube, not enough... fresh air, socializing, eating your vegetables, whatever it was the kids weren't doing enough of these days.

You closed your browser and went to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding the chapter title: That's the joke!


	2. the void calling

Your dreams were troubled that night. Or you had to assume they were. You rarely remembered your dreams, but you felt horrible on waking, as though you hadn't slept at all. You felt twitchy.

Not the fun kind of twitchy. The bad kind.

It was like feeling a breeze across the back of your neck, but just a little too solid, the moment right before it turned out to be some insect crawling there. You felt on edge, uncomfortable in your skin.

You decided to stay off Youtube for a few days. Sure, your subscriber notifications would pile up, but you'd get some extra work done, maybe finish some long-standing quests in your games, catch up on your murder podcasts; it wasn't like anyone was waiting on your one hit or Like or comment one way or another. Not a big deal.

In fact, once you got out of the habit, you forgot all about the whole thing. You got up, you went about your daily activities, you listened to music and podcasts, you gamed at night, you talked to your friends. Everything was pretty much the same, except instead of Jackaboy and Markimoo yelling in the background you listened to the Casefile guy or your favorite band. 

One Friday evening, you found your way to a meme compilation, and you happened to glance over at the numbers on the left of the screen. You winced. You really had to catch up on your subscriptions.

Then you remembered.

You went to Jack’s page, stared at the video. The title in Zalgo text, per usual.

A strange giddy dizziness accompanied the sight of it. It was like the moment when you look down over a cliff, your stomach suddenly lurching with the realization that _you could jump  -_ the horrible impulse like a whisper in your ear, urging you forward. You read somewhere that the impulse was called _l'appel du vide_ – the call of the void.

How appropriate.

You clicked through.

It was the usual gambit – given out in tiny enough doses to keep it fresh, of course; Seán and Robin knew how to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. Jackaboy, always sweet and endearingly enthusiastic, painfully unaware of his Other, soon to overwhelm him and prowl the screen again, a shrieking scratching nightmare with a big knife and a bigger ego.

Then, you knew, he would disappear again before the next video – like the big cats at the zoo who were always sleeping somewhere just out of sight, sometimes lolling out a big paw or a flashing tail for just long enough to make it worth the price of admission.

Just long enough to keep the kids coming back.

As expected, it wasn't long before the video stuttered and then glitched away to reveal Anti's face, his green-tinted realm with its usual distortions.

“Y̵ou̶ t͝ri̴e͢d ̛t̕o f̨or͞ge̷t ̷mȩ.” He disappeared a moment, reappeared in a scatter of static.

Had you seen this part before? He said things like that sometimes – you were always idly fascinated by the volatile mix of petulance, abandonment, and malicious amusement with which he demanded your attention. But you didn't remember this.

“͜But ̢nǫw҉ you're͜ ͡b͠ack.̶ An̡d ̡y͢ơu ţhơug͏h̷t ͝I w̶ou̵l̕dn't ͘no̴tice.̶” He was moving across the screen now, close then distant, then closer, pointing the knife into the camera. Although he was only smiling through clenched teeth, you could hear his laugh, see doubles of him flashing through, blood in their eyes, rage in their strange, jerky movements. He stopped short, his gaze sharpening into what felt a lot like direct eye contact. “L͢ook at yo͠u͢.͟ ̴Terri̛fied.͝ ̵A̵ll ͞b͞ec̛aus̛e ͞I ͠sa̡id͢ y͘our͟ ͘na͝me.” His smile widened.

You hit pause, pushed your chair back from the screen, threw your headphones down and stumbled to your feet. Enough of this already.

Silence. Your heart was beating fast in your throat and you could hear it, could hear your shallow breath, tight in your chest. It was too dark in your room. The sun must have set without you noticing; you'd lost track of time. You turned for the light switch.

On your desk behind you, your headphones crackled and snarled back to life. They were too far away for you to hear them, but you did. Just as clearly as your own racing heart, you heard two words crisply articulated over the harsh noise of an electronic scream. The echoes of a laugh came through just as clearly.

“Too͏ ͡l̵a͝te.”

You turned, slowly. He – the video – was still there, unmoving, paused. No sign that he was somehow still speaking. _Of course not. Calm the fuck down._

Then, with a squeal and an abrupt staticky squelch you had never heard your computer make before, your screen went black.

Complete darkness.

You lurched, unseeing and more panicked than you’d have liked to admit, for the light switch. You stumbled over your own chair and kicked it over, but you got to the light switch. It was your own room, with no one in it but you. Cozy and familiar and safe. With the lights on you felt silly for how you had reacted to a moment of darkness.

Warily you inspected your computer. Everything looked normal from the outside, but when you tried to turn it on, the screen didn’t respond. Fried.

You gave it a few more tries, pulling the plug from the power strip and putting it back in, holding the button down, and so on, but there was nothing. You sat down and sighed, defeated. You hoped it was just the screen, a simple at-home repair if you had the tools; without being able to see, you couldn’t tell if there was a deeper problem in the computer. _Damn it._ You didn’t have the money for this.

You tried to make a joke about it to yourself. _Anti broke your computer. Send him a claim for half the cost of repair._ The tiny hairs on your arms did not think it was very funny, nor did your stomach, which did a halfhearted little flip-flop of protest.

Even though it was clearly futile, you fiddled with the computer and its cables a bit longer, not yet ready to resign yourself to lying in bed with this pit in your stomach. Nothing helped. Your mind kept drifting back to the mocking smile on Anti's face before the screen went dark. It made your skin crawl. 

Your dreams that night assumed the shape of a man filled with dark and swarming flies. Even on waking you remembered it, that buzzing void of a face that was somehow still staring, somehow still grinning. It remained on the back of your eyelids like a spot from looking too long at the sun, like the images that would sometimes burn themselves into an old computer monitor.

The buzzing, too, remained when you woke up. It was coming from your desk. You kept your eyes closed a moment longer.

Finally, with a groan, you went to brush your teeth and get your morning cup of coffee. When you came back your computer screen was back on.

You didn’t have the willpower this early in the morning to make yourself believe it was a fluke. As if still in a dream, you walked over and sat back down at your desk.

Your desktop background was a picture of you with your cute little cousins, on your way to take them trick-or-treating; they were dressed as a bee and a cat, each holding up a candy bucket and smiling proudly. You were a zombie, the fastest costume you could put together, and you held their hands.

Right over your face, hiding your slapdash makeup job, a new folder had appeared.

“tǫo͝ l̛ate”

Really, Zalgo text in a folder name? You didn’t even know that was possible. You clicked it. Inside, just one file, a .jpg with your name on it in lowercase.

It was your desktop background again, but instead of your genuine albeit perfunctory smile for the camera, you wore a disturbing, too-wide, inhuman grin that split your face so eerily you almost missed the deep gash that had appeared in your throat, the gush of blood like a red scarf flowing down from it. You closed the file quickly. A little crackle of static came out of your speakers, but it felt like laughter.

You told your computer to restart. Pretending this was your usual tech support problem seemed a bit silly, but you didn’t have any experience with... whatever this was. A virus? An invasion? It couldn’t reasonably be called hacking, could it? While it rebooted you went to get another cup of coffee, not that you needed one. You stayed in the kitchen and drank it.

You were afraid of what would be on your screen when you went back in. You might as well be open with yourself about that.

But there was nothing. The picture was gone, the folder was gone, everything was as if it had never happened. Somehow that didn’t make you feel any better.


End file.
